AT&T Now Has LTE Roaming In Canada, But Oh Boy Could It Cost You

This Canadian $10 bill would only buy you about 612 KB of LTE usage on without one of AT&T’s add-on plans. (photo: Triborough)

Thinking of visiting our neighbors to the north? If you’re an AT&T customer, you may be interested to know that the company is now offering LTE roaming, and AT&T is currently the only American wireless provider with such an arrangement. But what you need to know is that it doesn’t come cheap.

The company announced today that it has made a deal with Rogers in Canada that gives AT&T LTE users access to the Rogers LTE network, but at prices that are remarkably expensive.

Let’s put that into perspective. Download a 150KB restaurant menu PDF; that’s $2.25, not including the data used up just loading the web pages or accessing the e-mail it took to get to that PDF. Download a 4MB song and your bill goes up by more than $60. Stream a few hundred megabytes worth of video and you’ve spent more than you would on non-roaming service for several months.

The Data Add-On packages do significantly decrease your roaming costs, but also highlight just how ridiculous the pay-as-you-go price is. The lowest tier costs $30 for 120MB, dropping the per-megabyte cost to $.25/MB, one-sixtieth of the roaming cost without the package. The most expensive add-on package is $120 for 800 MB, or $.15/MB — that’s 1/100 of what AT&T charges for roaming on LTE in Canada.

Regulators need to examine the costs of international roaming, as one has to wonder how AT&T — and any wireless carrier — can justify charging anywhere from 15 cents to 15 dollars for the exact same service.